Chicken Coke: Great recipe, terrible cook

I’d had a long morning powered only by a bagel from Dunkin Donuts, and I was about to start my day at my school without a proper lunch. Just outside the Bonghwasan stop and on the way to my school is a giant five-story Home Plus grocery store. I stared in awe the first time a saw it. The first floor has a varied food court that I hoped could provide me with some sustenance other than the McDonald’s I knew would be waiting for me at the end of my walk to my school.

The food court has half a dozen windows like any mall food court, but they are all in Korean so I have only a vague idea of what they serve except for the Dunkin Donuts. I’d already been to the one in my neighborhood that morning, so that was out.

In the center of the food court are a couple of food stand outposts including an ice cream stand and a flashy sanitized version of a Korean street food vendor. The green plywood and bubbling pot of hot oil that characterizes most street food stands is replaced by a well-lit glass case full of neatly stacked piles of fried food.

At the end of the case were some tall drink cups with what looked like popcorn chicken sticking out. I pointed and one of the overly smiley attendants said “Chicken Coke.” I’d seen something like this long ago on Serious Eats, and I’d been wishing I could have one ever since. For those of you who haven’t heard of this breakthrough in food design before, a Chicken Coke is a fountain drink cup with a smaller fitted cup that sits in the top of the cup. This allows you to fill the main cup half full with Coke and then fill the smaller cup full with fried chicken. A straw sneaks past the chicken into the Coke so you can hold your drink and snack in one hand and eat the chicken with the other. Great idea.

It was only 2,000 won. I had to order it. Immediately I was worried about the execution of this triumph in food architecture. When you order already deep fried food on the street, the vendor pops it back into the oil to reheat it for you, but being in a modern street food stand the woman threw my cup of chicken bits into the microwave for a 20-second jolt. She then unscrewed an already opened plastic liter Coke bottle and filled me cup. My enthusiasm had been nearly flattened in that 20 seconds because I knew I would be facing flat Coke (the worst) and soggy chicken. She then squirted a thick orange sauce generously over the chicken. I half-hoped the sauce would be good enough to cover the chicken flavor, but I didn’t have high hopes.

The Coke was flat. The chicken was cold and soggy. The sauce was pretty bad – semi-spicy with some citrus and a sweet syrup. The texture of the chicken was especially unsettling. Usually with fried and street food I try not to inspect it too closely. I just go ahead and eat it. For some reason I felt compelled to bite one of the nuggets in half and see what was inside. I was greeted with a gray lump clearly formed from the worst ground chicken parts. It was way below McDonald’s nugget standards, let alone their Chicken Selects meals. I actually ended up throwing the last third of both the chicken and the Coke out, something I rarely do as a ten-year member of the Clean Your Plate Club.

More photos of my terrible Chicken Coke adventure can be found on Flickr.